Re: ignore blank line removals

> John Rood <mr.john.rood@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 10:57 AM, John Rood <mr.john.rood@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> If the contents of a file initially are:
>>>   one
>>>
>>>   three
>>> and on branch A there is a commit, removing the blank line:
>>>   one
>>>   three
>>> and on branch B there is a commit, adding 'two':
>>>   one
>>>   two
>>>   three
>>> Normally, if you try to merge A into B (or B into A), git recognizes a
>>> decision needs to be made between removing the second line or add
>>> "two" to the second line. It would be convenient to have a merge
>>> strategy that defaults to the latter in cases where the removed line
>>> was a blank line (or a line containing only whitespace) ...something
>>> like -Xignore-blank-line-removals.
>>
>> Is there any push-back on this, or is there a backlog that we can add
>> this feature to?
>
> If you mean by "push-back" objections that say "this feature is evil
> and should not be added to Git, ever", I do not think we saw any on
> the list.  The lack of response is most likely that everybody
> thought "Meh." aka "It is not useful/interesting/valuable enough
> feature to bother discussing."
>
> One thing I wondered was what you would want if the contents were
> one/three without blank, A added blank between the two and B
> replaced blank with two.  As your example shows, in the filetype you
> are dealing with, a blank line has no significant meaning (otherwise
> you won't be ignoring the change A made to remove the blank in your
> original example).  The outcome desired by you may be one/two/three
> without any blank in that case because of that.  Which would lead to
> the suspicion that ignore-blank-line-removals is not a good general
> feature (i.e. in this other example, you want to ignore blank line
> addition).  Which further leads to the suspicion that the desire you
> expressed in the original post is not well thought through to be a
> useful specifification to build anything out of (yet), but is merely
> a potentially interesting discussion starter.  And nobody so far
> found it interesting enough to spend time discussing it further to
> make the wish detailed enough to be called a "design" of a new
> feature.
>
> Having said all that.
>
> I suspect that you may not have to make any change to Git to do what
> you want; can't you just use the 'merge' attribute with a custom
> 3-way merge driver that removes an empty line?
>